Tim Gourley

Moving On

2011-09-01T00:00:00-07:00

For the past three years I’ve called Engine Yard my home. It’s been a great job, working with both intelligent employees and intelligent customers. The first couple of years I was in Application Support, keeping Rails apps running smoothly and helping them scale. Then I did time in Profesional Services, helping with performance analysis, migrations, custom Chef recipes, and so on. I split my time between Professional Services and working as the Master Instructor, managing the curriculum and teaching the Zero to Rails 3 course.

I’ve been busy. I never thought working remotely would keep me busy but this job has had me working harder than any other job I’ve held. At times it has been stressful but for the most part it has been very rewarding. And I’ve made some valuable friendships along the way.

But now it is time for me to move on. I’m moving to BLiNQ Media to work as a software engineer. This company is cool and follows agile practices to achieve some impressive results. I can’t wait to contribute!

I’ll still be working from home, utilizing pairing and other agile practices to get things done. It’s going to be a lot of fun. My first day isn’t until the middle of the month so wish me luck as I transition into this new venture.

Why I'm Not Deactivating Facebook (yet)

2011-07-04T00:00:00-07:00

Like many of my colleagues, I have accounts on most of the major social networking sites. I also am the type of person who jumps on a new service as soon as an invitation is available to check it out.

The most recent service in this trend is Google+, Google’s first serious foray into the social networking space. Their other services (Wave and Buzz, namely) have fallen short of what users want from a social network, but Plus seems to be catching on big time.

I’m really digging the interface. It’s reminiscent of Facebook, but it feels more like a more-organized Twitter. The focus is on the stream and organizing the people you follow into Circles, making sharing to different groups of friends easy. The way it works just makes sense and it beats the convoluted security settings of Facebook hands down. Add on top of that a feeling of openness and cool features such as Hangouts and you have a killer product that I can’t tear myself away from.

I’ve read several posts about people deactivating Facebook in favor of Google+, and while that’s a noble goal for many reasons, I’m not quite ready to make the jump just yet for several reasons.

Authentication - Sites are still using Facebook to connect, login, and manage authentication. And others, such as the awesome music sharing/discovery chat room Turntable.fm currently only allow you to connect if you are on Facebook and are friends with someone who already has access. Deactivating now before Google+ opens up and has a killer API is premature.
API - There’s no Google+ API yet. It’s coming. We’ll get it, and there will be games. Granted, I can’t stand Farmville and the like, but they do draw people and keep them coming back. Plus for every 10 Farmville clones there’s at least one good application that has a good use. :p
User base - Google+ is still in beta, and currently the invitation system is turned off. As more bugs are worked out and capacity is met, more people will get to join, but as of now it is still in the very early stages. Half the people I’d share with are not able to join yet, even though they really want to.
Event planning - This is a minor complaint, but a complaint nonetheless. Google+ doesn’t have an easy way to set up events like Facebook. My family and my friends both rely on this system to get us to gatherings on time, so I need access to this. Sure, I could convert everyone to something like Evite, but that would take a lot of effort and convincing people to sign up for yet another service. Anyone have any good solutions for this?

That being said, I’m using Facebook less and less. It’s only a matter of time before the above reasons are no longer issues for me, then it will be time to cut the Facebook cord.

Are you using Google+ and Facebook? If so, do you plan on dropping one for the other?

Simplification

2011-06-10T00:00:00-07:00

It is time for the annual site redo, where I finally get tired of the look and feel of my blog and totally mix it up. This go round, I’ve taken the approach of combining and dropping a few blogs in favor of a single spot, making it more likely that I’ll keep it updated.

I’ve also gotten rid of the vcard site template all together. While it was shiny and pretty, it felt more like an advertisement. I’m not really trying to advertise myself to the world, I’m just trying to stake my own claim on the virtual real estate property of the Internet.

The goal of this design is to be very simple. Two columns, mostly text, few images, and no clutter. There’s no real heavy use of Javascript or other technologies that just don’t have a place on this modest little blog. It’s all static, generated via Jekyll.

I made the decision to go with HTML5 and use Sass for CSS. The result is rather clean markup and super-readable CSS (in its non-compiled form of course). The font is sized to be readable and pleasant without causing much strain, which is important since I tend to ramble.

I hope it the changes work for you, my friends!

The Writing Bug

2011-01-18T00:00:00-08:00

Every year for the past three years the same thing has happened to me: I’ll write my rear end off during November to complete NaNoWriMo, and by the time the month is over and my 50,000 words is complete I am sick of writing.

I’ll still blog and post on Internet forums and tinker with writing prompts and short stories, but anything substantial just doesn’t seem fun. It’s an overdose of serious writing all at once. It’s one of the few downsides to participating in a writing event that crams a large amount of writing into a very short amount of time.

I guess on one hand that could be considered a good thing. It gives me a much-needed break from my story, allowing things to congeal in my head so that when I finally come back to the story I’m fresh and hopefully have grown as a person enough that I can turn the Inner Editor back on and do some good. But in previous years I’ve gone back to my manuscript and decided that it just would require too much rework to be worth the effort spent.

And that’s true. My first two novels written during NaNoWriMo are pretty much derivative garbage. I don’t think I’m being hard on myself, either. I’m being honest and not trying to play the role of self-deprecating author to drum up sympathy from you, loyal reader. Seriously, reading the stuff I’ve written before I know I can do so much better.

I was pleasantly surprised today when I had the desire to come back to my story from the latest NaNoWriMo. I’m wanting to take it and mold it into a finished product that people will enjoy. Will it find a publisher and land me a big contract, or will I have to publish it myself to get the story out there? Well, time will tell on that part, but I honestly believe this story is interesting enough that people will love it.

I’ve been reading a lot of similar books in the genre lately, and I have to say, I can see my writing fitting in as is. So if I spend the time editing, refining, crafting, clarifying, solidifying and honing the story I have it can really be something special. And that makes me feel pretty good. I guess it’s true what they say: the third time’s the charm!

Rambling Reflections on Social Media

2011-01-11T00:00:00-08:00

Like the dot-com bubble of the nineties, I’m beginning to suspect that there is a bubble of social media that is reaching the breaking point. There is an overwhelming number of places one can go and build up a profile and a small gathering of followers or friends or whatever the site in question calls them. We’re becoming more and more comfortable just sharing and giving information away in order to get the ego boost of feeling like we have an audience.

There are actually businesses built on exploiting that desire. They tout surefire ways to build your social sphere of influence, build communities, and generate revenue from these people more than willing to throw their micro-payments your way in the form of real currency, “social bucks” in the form of things like Facebook credits, ad impressions, and the most valuable: your demographic data.

I’ve been one to hop on board with new startups trying to be the next big social media outlet. I’ve been in closed betas, open betas, slightly ajar betas, alphas, and the entire span of the Greek alphabet. I’ve been there since the beginning by blogging before that was even a term. I was helping podcast when mp3 files were too big and it was more efficient to share Real Audio. I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t.

And I still fall for something very basic. I spread myself too thin and wonder why I’m not getting the response I desire.

For example, I run a writers group called the Geek Writers. I started off promoting the group by building a Wordpress blog, linking that with a Facebook page, starting a Twitter account that received updates from all of those, and putting together a Google Groups mailing list. My thought was that if I wave my hands hard enough, people couldn’t possibly miss what I have to say.

I missed the point.

“The point” being that I was—and still am—trying to build a community of people with like-minded interests. And instead of focusing my attention on one area and making it work really well, I spread myself thin by taking advantage of every possible social outlet that would work. I ended up with a fragmented community: a handful posting on Facebook, a handful posting on the mailing list, a few people responding via Twitter, etc. But there was no real defining point of entry for my little community.

Social networks should support your community, they should not define it. They should solve a specific problem.

So I took a step back after talking with some friends of mine, and decided that the best way to promote the community was to not rely so much on other social networks and focus on building the community up in one place. So instead of using Facebook, Twitter, the blog, the mailing list, and so forth, I moved meeting management over to Meetup.com and use that almost exclusively now. I’m going to shut down the Facebook page, and the mailing list on Google Groups is now unused. I’m in the process of repurposing the blog to support the community instead of defining it by making it an outlet for content by way of helpful writing tips. I haven’t decided what to do with the Twitter account, but it’s usefulness isn’t really standing out to me right now.

Do you know what the result has been from this little experience? A more cohesive group presence online. We’ve been growing our numbers at a reasonable rate. And it feels actually manageable instead of overwhelming. It’s a great feeling.

Ok, I’ve sort of rambled on this post and strayed from talking about the “bubble”. I’ve felt the effects of being over-saturated in the social sphere online, and I know I’m not the only one. I have a feeling that it won’t always be the “new hotness”. Just look at MySpace’s current implosion. They’re feeling the heat of competition and people not willing to spread themselves thin anymore. Maybe it’s a sign of things to come, or maybe I just need to get some more sleep. :)

Fire Bad. Tree Pretty.

2011-01-09T00:00:00-08:00

You’re probably wondering what the deal is with the title of this blog post. What could it possibly mean? Has Tim lost his ability to use verbs? Is he suddenly down to the IQ of a prehistoric ancestor to the human race? Or is he shoving relatively obscure pop culture references out there in an effort to appear witty?

Yeah, ok it’s the last one. The title is a quote from Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, from Graduation Day Part 2. Buffy says this line as a reference to another episode: Beer Bad, which describes Buffy’s experience with beer after dealing with the misogynistic Parker. It’s been stuck in my head all day today.

Today has been brew day. Lori and I spend the day cooking up a batch of a Belgian Tripel pale ale. And yes, the process seemed to take all day.

It all started from a malt extract kit, which is the easiest way to start brewing beer. At first it’s a lot like making tea: heat some water to 150ºF, steep the specialty grains, brought that to a boil, then added in all the liquid malt extract and dry malt extract. After that we added hops at a variety of intervals, cooled the hot “wort” to room temperature, racked the beer into a glass carboy, added the yeast, and viola: beer!

Now we just have to wait for it to ferment, then we can start bottling it. A month from now we should have five gallons of tasty brew.

Interested in pics of the process? I have a photo set on flickr showing what we did.

Other Blogs of Mine

2011-01-06T00:00:00-08:00

So my blog here, which is seeing new life, is not the only place in need of revitalization in the sphere o’ blogs. I maintain a handful of other weblogs that emphasis different important areas of my life. The blog you are reading now is my “catch all” life-story blog about me. It’s the general store of my written words.

I have a blog for my son, It’s A Big World, Mason. This blog is devoted to cutesy little updates on Mason and mainly pictures of him that we find too adorable to not share. I’m in serious need of giving this one more attention, especially for my remote friends and family who don’t get to hear me gush about my son every few minutes.

I run a technical blog at def cogitate, where I go on about things in the Ruby community that interest me. This blog could be a really beneficial asset to the community if I were to spend more time on it. So again I believe I shall make it so.

I’ve been fortunate enough to help build a great community of writers in the OKC area with the Geek Writers group, and we have a site that needs some major love now that we’ve moved meeting management tasks to Meetup. So one of my goals this year is to turn it into a blog covering the writing craft and showcasing selected works.

The final blog I run is devoted to a hobby of mine that is rather old-fashioned and somewhat questionable to some of my friends and family. For the past year I’ve been collecting, restoring, and even carving pipes. At T.S. Pipes you’ll find pictures of my work, ruminations on the hobby, and reviews of various specialty tobaccos. It’s part of my quest to become more of a man (along with using straight razors, dressing a little nicer, brewing my own beer, and so on).

All of this means one thing: Even though my new year’s resolution this year is to write something every day, it won’t necessarily be here on Tim’s Daft Junk. I’ll be writing on at least one of my blogs every day to keep things fresh. The variety of topics will serve to help keep me interested. I hope you find something you can enjoy in one or more of these blogs. If not, let me know and I’ll do what I can.

Thanks!

Music is My Life

2011-01-06T00:00:00-08:00

If you know me at all, you know I’m a music fan. I’ve always been musically inclined. When I was little I begged my dad to teach me to play the guitar since he would play it for me when I was little. I learned some basic chords that I could barely hit with my tiny fingers. From that point on the music bug stuck with me like a persistent June Bug continuously colliding with a porch light.

I remember vividly watching a news segment early one morning in 1986 that forever changed my life. The reporters were talking about the death of a very important musician, a man who was known as the “King of Swing”. In 1986 I had no idea what swing was or how an old man like him could have possibly been ruler of the playground. Surely he couldn’t go as high as me!

The self-proclaimed monarch of musicality was Benny Goodman, a jazz and swing musician, bandleader, and pure genius of the “single-reed licorice stick”, also known as the clarinet. The reporters cut to clips of Benny Goodman playing his clarinet and the high-pitched, nasally, reedy, and jazzy sounds coming from it sang out in pure beauty. I was instantly in love with the music.

I kept that in the back of my head for years, which is saying a lot for a little tyke. I was only seven in 1986 and had no idea that even playing that sort of an instrument was an option for me. But I remembered that sound and how energetic and happy it was. Hearing it made me happy.

When sixth grade rolled around, the band teacher from the junior high came to my elementary school to show off various band instruments and recruit people for the band. I was hesitant because I didn’t think my family could afford an instrument since for most of them you had to provide your own. My plan was to go into choir and sing since that was basically free, right? And my music teacher said I had a good voice and since I could sing pretty much in pitch it’d be easy for me.

In preparation for the recruiting onslaught, we watched videos that showed off the various instruments you could play in the band. Most people seemed excited about the saxophone, the trumpet, or the drums. I thought the sax was kind of cool and it might help me out in the popularity department, as far as you can be popular in a group full of band nerds.

But after a few instruments, they showed a clarinet and those memories from years before flooded back and my plans for choir were suddenly dropped. I had to play the clarinet! So when Mr. Terrones—the band director from the junior high—came and talked to us about joining the band, he asked me what I’d like to play if I joined band.

“The clarinet,” I said. He smiled and nodded. I’d find out later that the clarinet was his primary instrument, too. He showed me the basics of how to hold my mouth to play, known as the embouchure, and told me I had what it takes to play the clarinet.

I was excited! I had the approval of the almighty Mr. Terrones to play the instrument that I so enjoyed listening to! It took a lot of talking to my parents to convince them to let me join the band. Band instruments aren’t cheap, but fortunately a used clarinet isn’t that much money. My dad drove me to city shortly after that and we picked up a used clarinet for a few hundred dollars.

I stuck with the instrument in school, at first to keep my parents from killing me for wasting any money, but over time it began to feel more like an extension of my body than just a woodwind horn. Throughout my career in junior high and high school, I managed to achieve and maintain the coveted “first chair” position thanks to lots of practice and an obsessive interest in becoming good enough to play the jazzy stylings that I heard so long ago from the King of Swing. I didn’t realize how much practice and music theory one has to master before being able to properly play improvised scales in a pleasing manner. It’s really a lot of hard work!

Outside of the normal band, I did a few “honor” bands, including a group that ended up touring in England and Wales for a week, and I even led a band of my own at Christmas time where a group of friends and family would get together and carol at various houses. As an aside, we always targeted the houses with lots of cars out front as they’d likely be having parties and would offer us treats. Thanks for thinking of that one, BJ!

For reasons I’ll discuss at a future time, I didn’t go into music in college, and my clarinet career was cut short. I didn’t play in the band at all at OU, and I only played a single semester when I attended the University of Arkansas. My time was stretched thin having to work and go to class, so I had to make the difficult decision to put band on the back burner. It was a hard decision, but I had to do it.

I look fondly back on the days of band: the concerts, the grueling practices, the solos, and especially marching. It was a great time and I managed to make some life-long best friends out of the program, so for that I am forever grateful.

However, I often look back and wonder, “What if?” What if I had pursued music as my career and the focus of my life instead of making it just a hobby like it is now. What if I continued to play my clarinet instead of letting it sit in its case, taking up space in my closet? In the end I feel more like Harry Chapin’s Mr. Tanner than I do Benny Goodman.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret the decisions I’ve made. Music is still a big part of my life and it is something I’ll always cherish and hold near to me. In the end it is my life, but it isn’t my livelihood. And that’s OK.

The Dark Knight in a Warehouse

2011-01-04T00:00:00-08:00

I don’t have a lot to talk about tonight, so I thought I’d leave you all with a gift: It is a picture of me with some poor guy dressed up like Batman, taken when I was in junior high.

This was back at a holiday party thrown by my dad’s company in their warehouse in downtown OKC. Since it was a family-oriented gathering, they had someone in a rather dashing costume taking pictures with the children.

I obviously look very enthused, with my “whatever” face, shaggy hair, my junior high jacket, and Colorado Rockies sweatpants. Secretly, though, I was pretty excited about getting my picture taken with Batman. This was not long after Batman Returns came out, so he was still A Big Deal with the junior high crowd. Ok, at least the nerds. And that includes, I mean included me. *cough*.

My first brush with mortality

2011-01-03T00:00:00-08:00

Let me change gears a bit and get a little serious. I’m going to tell you about the first time I faced my own mortality and slapped it around. We’ve all faced certain doom on occasion, and either we grow from it or it overwhelms us. Obviously since I’m here typing this I vanquished my doom. Either that or I’m a seriously skilled poltergeist and should have my own movies and ethereal action figures.

I was in high school, attending the illustrious Moore High School in my hometown of Moore, OK. It was my junior year and life was going quite well: I was doing well in classes, excelling in my favorite subject (band of course), had a good group of friends, and a new relationship with a girl named Lori. Things couldn’t have been better.

Some say life has a way of balancing itself out, and I learned that the hard way one fateful morning. I awoke in my bed that morning and my arm was down off the bed, wedged between the wall and the bed. This was pretty normal for me, as I prefer sleeping in cold conditions and man! That wall can be nice and cozy cool. So I usually snuggled up against it when I slept. Sure, it’s weird, but hey I never claimed to be anything but.

That morning I guess my arm accidentally invaded the dwelling place of this season’s Big Bad in the form of a peckish spider hellbent on sucking the life out of my intruding appendage. It chomped down, as spiders do, and I recoiled in a very manly fashion by issuing a high-pitched scream and slapping at it with my other limp hand.

I honestly forget how much time passed between the bite and my showdown with the harbinger of doom, but it wasn’t long. A day or two? I forget. It’s all wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff now.

But on that fateful day I put the spider out of my mind and drove myself to school like any other day. The day was fairly typical, and apparently the spider wasn’t radioactive because I didn’t have any extra-powerful senses kicking in, nor did I stick to any walls or wear spandex. At least I didn’t on that day.

First hour was band, which worked out because we’d often meet an hour before school started to practice either marching or sectionals for the wind ensemble. This day I managed to get lucky and didn’t need to be at school early, but I tried to get their early anyway. It was a good excuse to hang out with band friends and wake up before the day really started.

After band, we wandered our way back into the other reality of school with our classes. Second hour was my favorite class of the day: Trigonometry. No, I’m not particularly fond of mathematics, but I sat right behind Lori in this class so I looked forward to it every day. I’d often spend more time talking with her, tying her hair in knots, or throwing chalkboard erasers her way instead of focusing on school work.

It wasn’t due to a lack of focus or because we were goofing off. No, instead the class was fairly slow-paced for us. Due to scheduling conflicts, we were in the trig class normally filled my seniors. The “honors” trig class a few of us were supposed to take was unavailable due to various conflicts. Mine was a combination of a conflict between band and my required Spanish class.

The class was nearly over and I was chatting away with Lori. I happened to look down at my arm because the bite was itching. Maybe it was my spider sense finally kicking in? No, but looking down I noticed that a red line stretching from the bite on my wrist up to my bicep.

“Lori,” I asked. “Is this bad?”

She looked and said, “Yes, that looks bad. What is it?”

“I think it’s from my spider bite.”

“You should get it checked out,” she said. I nodded, and being a stubborn boy, went to third hour. I asked another friend, Spencer, the same question and he nearly flipped out.

“Tim!” Spencer yelled. “That’s serious! You need to get to a doctor now!” By this time the line had grown and was halfway up my bicep, nearing my shoulder.

The teacher of the class agreed with Spencer and I was excused to go home. I got home and called my mother, who was working at a local hospital at the time. She came home, saw that the red line was up to my shoulder, and rushed me to the hospital.

I was taken to an ER examining room, and my mom—who worked at this same hospital—freaked out. Apparently that was the room they moved serious cases into for examination. Protip: If you need urgent care, don’t take your mother who works in the same place providing said urgent care. Mothers tend to flip out. It’s their job. They flip out more when the medical staff says is all inside baseball.

I was asked a billion questions (that’s called hyperbole folks), and was finally told that I had an infection that if left untreated, would have turned into sepsis. Sepsis is commonly called blood poisoning. It was from my spider bite, but not caused by the spider. It’s usually a bacterial infection or something like that causing the infection and eventual sepsis. So basically, if I had not ignored the bite I probably would have been fine.

I was given a series of medicines including antibiotics and whatnot. I was also given the weirdest steroid shot ever. It was administered in a not-so-happy place, and as soon as the needle pricked the skin, I could feel a surge that I can only describe as epic quality pins and needles surging throughout my body, starting with my rear end and pulsing outward to all other extremities. It caused my back to arch I yelled something probably in a hybrid of English and Spanish, and my eyes watered like crazy. It didn’t hurt, but it was the trippiest thing ever. Highly recommended, A++++ would do business again.

So the fun was over. I faced my mortality, found out what the problem was, and it was dealt with. The line subsided without growing any further, and I managed to get out of class for a day and a half. A happy ending to a scary (at least to me) story.

Have you ever faced something you thought was going to be the undoing of you?

Being a Good Friend

2011-01-02T00:00:00-08:00

I feel very lucky and blessed that I have a circle of very good friends. I know for a fact there are people out there I can trust, turn to in times of need, and rely on throughout thick and thin. Those people I call friends can expect the same from me. But what makes a good friend? How do you become one?

There are the basic tenets of friendship you should adhere to: honesty, sincerity, loyalty, respectfulness, and openness. But I think being a good friend goes well beyond all the common basics of being a friend. In fact, the above traits I consider to be things that you practice with everyone you come across. It’s part of just being a good person in general.

Dependability is a key factor. It’s hard to be a friend with someone if they’re behavior is erratic, flakey, or uncontrolled. Can you be depended on to stick up for me if the proverbial fecal matter is made chop suey by the rotating blades? Or will you be distracted by something shiny? How can you be a good friend if the slightest little things set you off?

Stepping up in the middle of a crisis separates acquaintances from friends. If you see someone in serious danger, or if someone comes to you in confidence or in serious need, how do you respond? Apathy is not the mark of a good friend, I’ll tell you that. Neither is hostility. Try showing some compassion and help steer the person out of danger while not expecting payment for your services. True friendship is a selfless matter.

Don’t be needy or clingy. You don’t have to spend all your time with a certain friend. And just because you’re not, that doesn’t indicate anything wrong with the friendship. People need space sometimes because they have their own lives and their own problems that don’t concern you. Pick up on the signs around you. When it’s time to back off or go home, do so.

Be a good listener. That kind of goes with the point above: if you’re monopolizing conversation with your own problems and feelings, then you’re showing some neediness that is likely off-putting and the sign of a poor friendship. Friendship is about give and take, so even if you don’t agree with the other person, listen to what they have to say and be open and honest in return. I value my friends who call me on my BS over people who just pander to what I’m saying in order to be pleasant.

Let me say that again: be open and honest. If you have a problem with your friend, let them know in a very diplomatic manner. Don’t let negativity stew, and don’t mislead your friend into thinking everything is OK. It only leads to unnecessary drama. But at the same time, if the person is really an important friend to you, be understanding and willing to forgive in the case of issues that arise.

Dump the paranoia at the door. You shouldn’t be thinking or asking, “Is my friend angry with me?” A real friend will let you know. Friendship is built on trust, and it isn’t wrought with conspiracies. Instead, examine the source of your paranoia. Why are you afraid for the friendship? Is it not as strong as you’d like? Or is the issue deeper than that? Have you been hurt in the past by someone claiming to be a friend while stabbing you in the back? Talk to your friend about this instead of letting paranoia get in the way.

Communication is key. In all relationships, communication is key.

Finally, live by the golden rule. Treat your friends how you want them to treat you. It’s as simple as that.

What other things do you find important in being a good friend? Comment away!

A New Year

2011-01-01T00:00:00-08:00

It’s a new year. Finally, 2011 is here and we can be done with all that we did in 2010. For me, 2010 was a great year, full of new things and a vast array of changes to every aspect of my life.

By far the biggest change has been the addition of my son, Mason. He’s profoundly changed my life forever, and in quite a good way. I’ve never felt so proud, so loved, so needed, and so wonderful. He’s affected me to the core and infected me with his happy and easygoing personality.

But this is a new year. How can it top the last? New goals, resolutions, hopes, and dreams need to be made. It’d be a shame to not build on the momentum of the wonders that 2010 brought.

I’m not going to talk about my resolutions or what I want to work on. Those are largely personal and something that no one except me and those closest to me will be interested in hearing.

I will, however, mention one thing: I’m planning on writing something every day this year. I have four blogs I’ve “maintained” by posting to sporadically, but I’ve never really made a serious effort out of keeping them going and making them interesting. I also have manuscripts that need editing, and ideas for short stories. And writing prompts for the writing group.

My goal will be to write something every day. Be it a blog post, or something else, I will write down words for 365 days consecutively. That’s going to be harder than I imagine, but I’m sure after a while it will become second nature. Right?

I won’t harp on quality. I won’t focus on making a grammatically correct pinnacle to all things prose. I will, however, write. The rest will follow with practice.

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2010-12-04T00:00:00-08:00

The mocha sustains me (Taken with Instagram at Starbucks Coffee)

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2010-11-30T00:00:00-08:00

Why yes, I did just print my winning #nanowrimo cert and take a pic (Taken with instagram)

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2010-11-30T00:00:00-08:00

Jaydon and Mason (Taken with instagram)

NaNoWriMo Preparation

2010-10-08T00:00:00-07:00

It’s that time of year again: Come November 1st I will begin writing at least 1,667 words a day in order to meet the requirements of finishing a 50,000 novel in the period of 30 days for National Novel Writing Month. It is somewhat of a right of passage for a lot of hobbyist writers, as it helps you overcome the fear that you can’t write a novel.

I’ve participated in the challenge the past two years, and completed it both times. Both times I’ve produced rather crappy books in the urban fantasy genre. If I had the desire to go back and edit like crazy I’m sure they could find an audience, but I’m looking at those manuscripts merely as practice.

This year, however, will be different. My novel will be very tongue-in-cheek, risqué, and and full of humor. My inspiration comes from consuming mass quantities of Christopher Moore, Joss Whedon, and Kim Harrison. Hopefully my novel this year will be entertaining and accessible to people outside of fans of the urban fantasy genre.

And yes, the Traveling Shovel of Death will make an appearance. Maybe more than once.

def cogitate

2010-10-08T00:00:00-07:00

def cogitate

I’m moving my technical discussions over to a tech-only blog. This way if you want to follow my ramblings, rants, and other junk you don’t have to be overwhelmed by ruby and mongodb disucssion.

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2010-09-08T00:00:00-07:00

lookatthisfrakkinggeekster:

New clip from The Walking Dead!

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2010-05-18T00:00:00-07:00

Gotta love Improv Everywhere!

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2010-05-17T00:00:00-07:00

fuckyeahlost:

A door in Lubbock TX.

[andrewcook]

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2010-05-15T00:00:00-07:00

fleetingftw:

pigtailsandcombatboots:

c-peterson:

boba-fettish:

justinrampage:

Need some tasty out of this world rum to throw down your trap? Admiral Ackbar has you covered! Admiral Akbar’s Olde Timey Rhum is made with the finest ingredients in all of Mon Calimari and aged to perfection, according to Elan Trinidad.

Admiral Akbar’s Rhum by Elan Trinidad/theory-of-everything (deviantART) (Twitter)

Our livers can’t repel alcohol of that magnitude!

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2010-04-28T00:00:00-07:00

He who trims himself to suit everyone will soon whittle himself away.

—Raymond Hull

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2010-04-22T00:00:00-07:00

At the monthly doctor’s appointment for checking up on the baby, I used my iPhone to record the baby’s heartbeat as the nurse checked with the fetal heart-rate monitor. Here’s the result. I apologize for the low quality. I tried to clean up a bit of the noise but you can still hear the heartbeat pretty clear. This is my kid’s heart going at 156 BPM, 16 weeks into the pregnancy.

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2010-04-12T00:00:00-07:00

Love song for Richard Alpert (from LOST). This is freaking hilarious!

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2010-03-29T00:00:00-07:00

Lost done “Buffy” style. EPIC!

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2010-03-28T00:00:00-07:00

The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.

—T. S. Eliot, from “Gerontion”

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2010-03-26T00:00:00-07:00

atmos:

i’m a lumberjaph » Blog Archive » Github explorer

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2010-03-26T00:00:00-07:00

New LCD Soundsystem single

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2010-03-24T00:00:00-07:00

Current Status: The Flaming Lips - Convinced of the Hex (live)

TNT - More Rack and Sinatra Goodness

2010-03-23T00:00:00-07:00

Another Tuesday is upon us, and that means more Tuesday Night Tech! I had some great feedback with last week’s Post on MongoDB UI Options so keep the suggestions coming. I’ll try to keep that list updated as long as there is interest. Although I leave it as an exercise to a more ambitious MongoDB fanboy to create a real directory for cool tools like this.

This week I want to shift back to looking at Rack, Sinatra, and a nifty tool for Ruby Development that you might find useful.

Sinatra: The big 1.0!

The big news this week is that the awesome web DSL/framework Sinatra hit the big version 1.0! It’s time to do the happy dance! What’s new? Well, for one it’s using something I’ve mentioned before, Tilt. It also marks the maturation of an awesome extension API and some serious performance improvements. See the official changelog for more information. Way to go Sinatra team!

Throttle those HTTP Requests

Whether you have an API you don’t want pounded, or just want to limit traffic from over-eager refreshers, the Rack middleware Rack::Throttle makes it stupid simple to add logic for rate-limiting incoming HTTP requests to Rack-based applications. This means it works with Sinatra, Rails 3, or whatever you use that supports Rack. Check out how easy it is to use:

# Pretend this is a config.ru file

require 'rack/throttle'

use Rack::Throttle::Hourly, :max => 100  # 100 reqs/hour

run MyAwesome::SinatraApp

Ruby Code Completion for vim and emacs

Wow. I never thought I’d user or even need this. As a Ruby guy using TextMate daily, I only fire up vim mainly when dealing with remote stuff like when I’m working. But a project called RSense works and does a reasonable job of autocomplete for your ruby code. Here’s an example of me typing ^X^U in vi after typing a string, a period, and the letter “u”:

It isn’t very easy to get running, though. You download the source and set up a dotfile with your ruby load path and gem path (hint: use $:.join(‘:’) and Rubygem’s Gem.path methods). Then you copy the plugin over to your ~/.vim/plugin/ directory, edit your ~/.vimrc, and then you’re set. I didn’t even look at the emacs (*shudder*) config, so I have no idea how involved that is. YMMV, but it is a pretty useful plugin if you use vim or emacs.

Post to Tumblr from Textmate

2010-03-23T00:00:00-07:00

I am a big fan of TextMate and use it as a general text editor, for Ruby development, and whatever else I can shove into its interface. And that now includes blogging. Surely there are many ways to achieve the nirvana of posting to Tumblr from TextMate but I did not find one readily available with a quick Google search, so decided to set out and come up with my own solution. It was remarkably simple.

First off, I downloaded the tumblr-rb gem created by Mark Wunsch. That installs a tumblr executable to your path:

gem install tumblr-rb

Then I created a dotfile that contains my tumblr credentials and placed it in my home directory:

$ cat ~/.tumblrlogin

email: notmyreal@address

password: mysecretpassword

With that setup, you can pass a file or a URL to the tumblr command to post to tumblr, or you can even shove data to it from STDIN. It’s flexible like that.

The cool thing is that you can author your blog post in Markdown and include some front-loaded YAML to set up things such as a title, tags, slugs, and so on.

With that in mind, I fired up ye olde Bundles -> Bundle Editor -> Edit Commands and chose the Markdown bundle and added a new command that looks like this:

So it looks like this:

Command: tumblr --credentials ~/.tumblrlogin

Input: Entire Document

Output: Create New Document

Activation: Key Equivalent (Whatever keystroke you want)

Now, I can open a new Markdown document, edit it, and hit my keystroke to have it automatically post to Tumblr! How cool is that? Here’s a very meta example of what my Markdown document looks like:

Now go have fun posting to Tumblr from TextMate!

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2010-03-17T00:00:00-07:00

Awesome melody of TV themes. Very well done!

Tuesday Night Tech - MongoDB UI Edition

2010-03-16T00:00:00-07:00

This week I’m focusing on UI options for administering MongoDB. Sure, you could use the javascript command shell “mongo” from the command line, but a lot of individuals out there are churning out viable options for administering the popular document-oriented database. All of these tools are relatively easy to get running, so I encourage you to play with them to see which one you like the best. Perhaps you might even be encouraged to lend a hand to help mature these projects?

Myngo

Myngo is a jQuery frontend written in Python using Tornado. It’s relatively attractive and reminds me a lot of Futon. If Python is your thing, check this out.

Mongo3

Mongo3 is a beautiful interface focused on managing clusters, written in Ruby using the Sinatra framework. It’s an easy gem install if you have Ruby ready to go.

futon4mongo

futon4mongo is a port of the popular CouchDB utility Futon. Its goal seems to be to match it feature for feature. It is written in Ruby using Sinatra, and was the first web UI I explored for MongoDB. It’s reasonably stable and works for a basic view into your data quite nicely.

phpMoAdmin

phpMoAdmin is a themeable PHP administration tool in a single 90kb file (hrm) with zero configuration. Ok, I have to admit, the prospect of looking at or even trying to contribute to the code for this project REALLY scares me, but you have to admire the ease of dropping a single PHP file in and starting to use the web to administer MongoDB. Give it a shot if PHP is your thing.

Opricot

Opricot is an Apache+PHP tool for administering MongoDB. It looks a little easier to use and more feature-filled than phpMoAdmin at this time.

MongoHub

I don’t know much about this product, but MongoHub is a native OS X GUI for MongoDB. It’s very fresh so it isn’t very feature-filled yet, but you can create multiple connections, browse collections, and run queries. It looks to be the start of a potentially very cool tool for OS X.

Do you know of any other UI tools for MongoDB I may have missed? If so, let me know in the comments!

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2010-03-15T00:00:00-07:00

Best use of Chat Roulette EVER! This guy is hilarious and good!

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2010-03-14T00:00:00-08:00

OK Go - WTF? — This is my anthem of the day.

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2010-03-14T00:00:00-08:00

All lyrics to songs should be presented like this.

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2010-03-14T00:00:00-08:00

The kids’ reactions are hilarious.

Would you rather be a vampire or a werewolf?

2010-03-09T00:00:00-08:00

That depends on the monster mythos you are going by. If you are going by the Buffy mythos, then definitely a vampire. I’d just go through the trials or piss off some gypsies and get cursed in order to get my soul back.

The werewolves in the Underworld universe are pretty cool, so if that’s what you’re talking then sign me up.

If you’re talking about the Twilight series, then either way just kill me and put me out of my misery.

Ask me anything

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2010-03-09T00:00:00-08:00

A moving tribute to the best portrayal of the Doctor yet.

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2010-03-09T00:00:00-08:00

It’s sabatoge!!!

Tuesday Night Tech - Hodge Podge Edition

2010-03-09T00:00:00-08:00

Cooking up Virtualized Systems with Chef and Vagrant

The first nifty new item up on Tuesday Night Tech is a neat Ruby tool called Vagrant, which is a tool for starting up virtualized development environments using Sun’s VirtualBox. The goal is to make it as easy as firing up an EC2 instance like we use on Engine Yard’s cloud. In fact, like EY’s Cloud offering, Vagrant utilizes Chef for provisioning and setup of your new virtual instance. It’s simple to use:

$ sudo gem install vagrant

$ vagrant box add base http://files.vagrantup.com/base.box

$ vagrant init

$ vagrant up

The Vagrant site has some easy-to-follow guides for using it. If you need to develop on multiple platforms this could be an interesting way to handle it!

Yet Another Mongo Abstraction Layer

Arguably the big-boy in Ruby ODM solutions for MongoDB has been John Nunemaker’s MongoMapper, followed by Mongoid. Another player has entered the field in the form of Light Mongo, an object persistence layer that tries to break out of the mold of ActiveRecord-like tools and work more closely with the unique feature sets of MongoDB.

Considering that with MongoDB you don’t need migrations or a defined schema or a lot of the concepts that ActiveRecord abstracts for SQL-based RDBMS, Light Mongo steps in by making the interface to the Mongo driver a lot easier. Let’s say you have a model named “Article”. You could save a new Article document with arbitrary keys as easily as doing this:

Article.new(:title => ‘Tuesday Night Tech’, :abstract => ‘Hodge podge of awesome code’).save()

It seems like a thin layer over the MongoDB Ruby driver and it might be interesting if you don’t want the constraints the other mappers give you.

Bust Your Hosts with The Gem Called Ghost

If you’re a developer and find yourself needing to modify your hosts file to add dummy local development domain names quite often, check out the Ruby gem named ghost. Ghost allows you to quickly and easily modify your hosts file:

$ ghost add myawesomesite.local
[Adding] myawesomesite.local -> 127.0.0.1

Then you can navigate to http://myawesomesite.local and assuming you have a web server listening locally on port 80, your site will appear.

This only works with UNIX-like systems so you Windows developers are out of luck on this one.

That’s it for this week!

MongoDB and File System Durability Explained

2010-03-03T00:00:00-08:00

MongoDB and File System Durability Explained

nosql:

I just found this post from Ivan Voras which is covering exactly what I’ve written a while back about MongoDB durability being a tradeoff. As a plus, Ivan’s post also includes a quick summary of various file system durability methods:

fully synchronous writes

partially synchronous writes

logging

journaling

soft updates

I only hope that based on these two posts, all MongoDB users will become aware of the MongoDB durability behavior (or differently put durability tradeoff).

formspring.me

2010-03-03T00:00:00-08:00

If you could eliminate one thing you do each day in the bathroom so you never had to do it again, what would it be?

Wow! This is a great question. However, I think that in spite of all the dirty answers I could give, I think the main thing I would get rid of all together would be shaving.

It sucks, takes up too much time, I hate cutting my face up, and I can’t grow a good beard to save my life. Maybe I need to electrocute my face to keep the hair from growing.

Ask me anything

2d geospatial indexing in MongoDB

2010-03-03T00:00:00-08:00

mongodb:

We have now added geospatial indexing to the product. Our approach has been to make something simple but fast: 2d only, and effective for common real world use cases such as lat/long location searches.

Would love to get some feedback on features people would like to see, how its working, etc…

Geospatial docs

More notes on 1.3.3 release

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2010-03-02T00:00:00-08:00

Just when I thought OK Go couldn’t get any cooler, they released another video for “This Too Shall Pass” featuring an amazing Rube Goldberg machine setup. Very impressive!

Turning into an advice columnist?

2010-03-02T00:00:00-08:00

I’m on Formspring, and here is my latest response to a question. I think I’ll start sending some of my responses here to the blog:

Why do boys suck?

I’ll admit this was a question I wasn’t expecting, but I’ll give it my best shot anyway.

On behalf of boys everywhere, I am sorry you are experiencing such frustration. However, it isn’t just boys that suck. Girls do their fair share of sucking, and it is rather unrealistic to assume it is just a single sex that is at fault. The real truth of the matter is that people suck.

But back to the question. The first thing to clear up in answering the question of WHY people suck is to understand what the verb “to suck” means. It sounds like you are not getting something from the boys in your life, or what you are getting from them is something completely the opposite of what you expect.

It could very well be that you have dealt with people who are emotionally immature and who are still catering to self-serving interests that most young-minded individuals serve. Your focus might be more on “boys” instead of “men” or “girls” instead of “women” and the disparity is causing your frustration. If that is the case you’re going to be better off dealing with “men” instead of “boys”. Also keep in mind that forcing people to change from one to the other just isn’t going to happen. Some males remain boys their entire lives. It’s all a state of mind. If this is the case then don’t steep yourself in the toxicity of immaturity. It’ll only bring you down and add to your frustration.

Another thing to consider is that everyone expresses their feelings in different ways. Gary Chapman wrote a series of books on what he calls the “Five Love Languages” and how they apply not only to married couples, but to friends, singles, children, and so on. While his viewpoints can be somewhat simplistic at times, it is really worth the read.

In those books he talks about the five different ways he sees people expressing and receiving love: Some prefer gifts or acts of service (such as helping you out in some way or doing chores), some prefer words of affirmation, others use quality time or even physical touch as a way of expressing their feelings. It could be that the people in your life are expressing feelings in ways that do not completely resonate with you. Take some time to study the people in your life. If they are expressing love but not in the way that makes you feel loved, then it is time to talk to them about it and make some changes.

Finally, I challenge you to examine your own expectations from the opposite sex (or same, I’m not judging). What is it EXACTLY that you expect from them? Are you looking for a simple fling, friendship, family? Are you throwing any high (or even unrealistic) expectations at the people you are pursuing? Are you trying to rush for a specific goal and overwhelming people with your demands? If so, then figure out what you need to change in yourself before condemning half the population of the planet as being stupid. It’ll only make you a better person if you can set realistic, obtainable goals for happiness that won’t leave you stranded in misery and defeat.

Good luck, anonymous. I hope this helped.

Tuesday Night Tech - Rack Edition

2010-03-02T00:00:00-08:00

This week’s Tuesday Night Tech post is pretty heavy on cool utilities to use with Rack, especially using the Sinatra framework. So if you’re fans of keeping things small, tight, and modular this post is for you. If not, well, enjoy your bloatware. ;)

Highlighting Code Displayed in HTML with rack-codehighlighter

Have you ever found yourself wanting to display code snippets in your outputted HTML with nice color code formatting to make things nice and presentable? Well, then this piece of middleware is just for you! Check out rack-codehighlighter which is a middleware wrapper for popular code highlighting plugins, such as ultraviolet, coderay, and syntax. With just a bit of code in your template, you can quickly add color flare via CSS to your views. Here is a quick (and rather ugly) example:

You can do much better with the CSS to generate some prettier colors, but it shows that you can easily make your code samples better looking for your site users.

Abstracting Template Systems for Fun and Profit with Tilt

Speaking of templates for your views, do you ever get tired of working with the differences in template systems in your Rack apps? Want a way to make interfacing with them as generic as possible so your code doesn’t have to change much if the templating system does? Well, Tilt by Ryan Tomayko might be for you then!

Check out the examples on the Github page for a complete rundown. Basically it allows you to load your template with a rather easy interface:

require "erb"

require "tilt"

template = Tilt.new('views/foo.erb')

output = template.render

You could easily replace the line requiring ERB with HAML and load a HAML template and use the Tilt methods the exact same way, making going between tempate systems pretty easy. Ryan recommends explicitly requiring your template system like I did above, although it’s not strictly necessary as Tilt will lazy-load the library when needed. It just might cause problems if you don’t.

Get Some Granularity In Your Sinatra Filters with sinatra-any

Blake Mizerany released a neat little plugin for Sinatra today called sinatra-any that allows you to specify URL before filters much like you do handlers in Sinatra now. So you can do something like this:

any '/admin/*' do

  halt 403 if unauthorized?

end



get '/admin/secret_stuff' do

  do_cool_secret_admin_things()

end

That’s all there is to it! Simple, neat, and easy!

Got something cool you want to see on Tuesday Night Tech that is somehow interesting to the Ruby universe? Let me know!

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2010-02-25T00:00:00-08:00

onecoolthing:

This band is from the future…clearly.

A live performance of Neurosonics Audiomedical Laboratories by Chris Cairns

Found this cool thing through laughingsquid.com

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2010-02-25T00:00:00-08:00

It’s a Matt and Kim kind of morning.

Tuesday Night Tech

2010-02-23T00:00:00-08:00

This week I haven’t found the plethora of Ruby-specific new things for Tuesday Night Tech, but I do have a few nuggets of joy I’d like to share that I’d consider interesting. The first isn’t even Ruby-related at all.

gleeBox

I’m a big command-line fan. I’d much rather open a Terminal and get things done instead of waving a mouse around. In Windows I tend to use programs like Launchy to open applications, and on the Mac I’ve used QuickSilver (and now I just use Spotlight) for the same thing. I’ve been wanting the same type of keyboard navigation for the web, and now I’ve finally found it with gleeBox.

gleeBox is an extension for Firefox and Google Chrome. Once you install it and navigate to your usual favorite websites (like, say, http://blog.timgourley.com for example), you can hit the letter “G” and it will bring up a window where you can start typing. You can type in the text for any link on the page, and as you type it will highlight any of the links with text matching what you type. Then you can hit tab to cycle through the matches or just hit enter to navigate to that particular link. It saves a load of time if you’re like me and prefer a keyboard to a mouse.

Seer

If you are a Rubyist finding yourself in a position where you need to create graphs based on data you’ve collected in your application, you might check out Seer, which is a simple semantic graphing tool that works with Ruby on Rails to provide a clean interface to the Google Chart Tools. Installation is a simple “gem install seer” and you then call the Seer::visualize() method passing in your data and the options you want for the chart you are creating. You can quickly create all sorts of visualizations such as pie charts, line graphs, scatter chart, gauges, and so forth. It’s pretty clean. The only thing to consider is that it means that Google is generating charts based off your data, so if that is a concern for your application you may want to look elsewhere.

Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies

My friend James Edward Gray || has the latest challenge on the RubyLearning Blog, writing a Ruby application to play Broadsides, or as it is commonly known, Battleship. This is a fun challenge to get you thinking and have a lot of fun competing with other people. There’s little barrier to entry on this as the requirements are basically just Ruby, the Rake gem (who doesn’t have that?), git (to get the code from github), a browser with Javascript, and a desire to think about the best ways to destroy your peers! (bwahahaha) Get your entries in before March 14th!

It's Finally Real

2010-02-23T00:00:00-08:00

Today Lori and I nervously made our way to the HealthPlex for the first in a series of several ultrasounds. I could tell we were nervous, mainly from the unseasonable sweating and jittery behavior. We sat down for to wait for registration and I turned to Lori.

“I’m nervous and excited!”

“Oh yeah?” She asked with a smile.

“Yeah. I don’t know what it will be! I hope it’s a baby and not a burrito!”

I have no idea why that worry crossed my mind at the last minute. But the thought of Lori giving birth to an Ultimate Gourmet Burrito from Taco Bueno sent me over the edge and I really had a hard time controlling my giddy laughter. I’m certain other people in the waiting area thought I was in for an MRI for some mental issue, and not here to support my pregnant wife through her first ultrasound.

We finally got back to the room with all the fancy equipment and Lori was slimed while the technician ran the probe over her gut in search of the gestational sack. In just a few short minutes, we could see a blob-looking thing about the size of a quarter moving around. Looking closely, we could see a tiny heartbeat.

Oh my word. It’s real. We’re having a baby.

We got to hear the heartbeat, beating away at a brisk 169 beats per minute. The technician estimated that the baby is about half an inch long or so, which is expected this early on at about 8 weeks or so. But in the beginning of October we should have a real baby-sized person joining the family. Wow.

As a man there are very few occasions deemed appropriate to tear up in public. This was definitely one of them, and I didn’t even rely on the trusty allergy excuse.

Reality Check Incoming

2010-02-22T00:00:00-08:00

Tomorrow marks the first of a series of landmarks that will culminate in the birth of a new child at the end of September (provided all goes as scheduled). What landmark is that? The first ultrasound.

A technician will start the sonogram, hurling high-frequency soundwaves at the baby in order to check for abnormalities.

They’ll also check for things such as multiple births, which there are several occurrences of in both of our families. That has been an interesting thought we’ve been having regularly. Lori has even had a dream that we were having twins. Personally, I’d love it if we did, but I won’t be disappointed if we don’t. It’s going to be scary enough having one let alone more at once.

Hopefully we’ll get our first glimpse of the baby if everything cooperates, and maybe we’ll be able to hear a rapid heartbeat. Whatever the case may be, I’m excited about the prospect. I’m certain that it will be during this particular visit that the reality of the situation will finally hit. Once I get the visual proof that there’s really a baby there I’m sure my world will be forever changed.

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2010-02-21T00:00:00-08:00

A great fan-created tribute to the Doctor. If you haven’t seen the new Doctor Who series, this might convince you to give it a shot!

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2010-02-19T00:00:00-08:00

This has me cracking up still!

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2010-02-17T00:00:00-08:00

Today is a great day for some of Montreal!

Some Good News

2010-02-17T00:00:00-08:00

A few weeks ago on a lazy Sunday we were sitting at our computers. I had just got out of bed and grunted my good morning as I contemplated what kind of life-giving coffee juice to brew to recharge my batteries. My wife Lori told that we needed to go to the store when we were out and about later. I didn’t think anything of it as I shook my head to shake the cobwebs loose, but asked her if she needed anything in particular much like I normally do. She looked me in the eye and said, “we need to pick up a few pregnancy tests.”

Wait… What?

“Pregnancy tests. You know, like a magic eight ball, but it’s more like a magic ‘18-to-life’ ball.”

Oh.

Ohhh…

OHHHH!!!

My mind immediately started racing. I thought maybe we could swing by a place to pick up a new crib, and OH! I know the perfect pattern to paint the nursery, and we need to start a college fund and maybe start buying government bonds. Do you think the kid will want to go to my alma mater of OU or ECU like Lori? Oh my gosh, can you really fit a car-seat in the back of a Ford Mustang? Holy crap we need to get on lists for daycare! And there’s…

“Time out,” she said. “We need to use the tests first.”

Right. The tests. The almighty, life-changing, all-important tests. I can handle that.

On the way to the store, I kept thinking to myself: are we ready? Am I mature enough at the age of 30 to be responsible for another life? Sure I love being around my nieces and nephews, but one of my own? Granted, we’ve been thinking of children for a while now and were really trying, but actually being confronted with the prospect of having a child is being confronted with one’s own mortality. Are you, perspective father, ready to take everything you enjoy now and flip it on its head for something scary and new?

In a word: Absolutely.

In two words: Hell yeah.

In three: Bring it on.

We got the tests and Lori went to “administer” it. That’s the polite way of saying she peed on a stick. The results came back with an unquestionable and undeniable “Pregnant.” Both of us were overjoyed yet nervous and decided we needed a second opinion. So after chugging a metric ton of fluids and me doing my best to refrain from calling Lori “Home Skillet” a la Juno, she tried another test and received the same results. Yay us!

Since then we’ve both been reading a lot of books, receiving advice from every single person we tell, and doing a lot of smiling and nodding each time someone tells us some crazy idea like drinking lots of water and avoiding raw sushi. No seriously, it’s been great so far and I look forward to the entire process. Lori has already been to the doctor and we have the first ultrasound this next week to hear the heartbeat for the first time. I’m very excited.

I plan on blogging my point of view of my transition into fatherhood. I hope I can make it somewhat entertaining and enjoyable for you to read. I know experiencing it firsthand so far is pretty good for me!

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2010-02-16T00:00:00-08:00

My father always told me, “Find a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.

—Jim Fox

Tuesday Night Tech

2010-02-16T00:00:00-08:00

Sending E-mail with Pony

If you just need to send off a quick e-mail from Ruby and you don’t want to rely on the behemoth that is ActionMailer or do a lot of wheel reinvention with Net::SMTP, then you might look at the Pony gem from Adam Wiggins. It allows you to send e-mail without a lot of fuss, making it as easy as PHP’s mail() function. Check out the example:

require 'rubygems'

require 'pony'



Pony.mail(:to => 'email@address.com', 

          :from => 'me@address.com', 

          :subject => 'Hello!', :body => 'Hello, world!')

That’s all it takes. It tries to use sendmail first, but if that doesn’t exist, it will attempt to use SMTP over localhost to send mail. If neither of those options will work, you can specify the transport of your choice in the Pony.mail() method to send it out. It can’t get much easier than that! I use it in my custom Sinatra app on timgourley.com to send contact notices as well as lost-password notices.

Massive E-mail Blasts with PostageApp

Let’s say Pony won’t fit your needs because you need to send out a regular-recurring mailing to a large number of recipients (opt-in of course. Spammers deserve the nastiest sorts of death). Let’s also say that you don’t want to manage a mail server yourself because there is a lot of pain in dealing with those sorts of setups when you deal with any sort of real volume. Then check out PostageApp, which is a service that will send out your e-mail blasts for you, with a cool interface for accountability purposes.

PostageApp gives you a simple JSON API. You POST the mail to their servers as a simple RESTFUL call with a JSON body and they handle the actual sending of the mail. There are plugins for Ruby on Rails and PHP, but honestly the API is simple enough that you can use it in any platform or framework.

Riding Shotgun as You Develop

Whenever I write code using the Sinatra micro-framework, I used to end up starting up the server with “ruby myapp.rb” or with a call to “thin -R config.ru”. The bad part of this is that whenever you make a change in your source code, you have to restart the server so your changes are reflected. Not anymore, with shotgun.

Shotgun is a reloading fork of rackup, so you can run your rack applications. The cool thing about shotgun is that when a request is received, it forks off, loads up the application, and handles the request. So you end up with your most recent code changes being instantly available without having to restart the server. This saves a lot of development time. Sure, the requests are a bit slower with all that reloading, but in the end you will save time. I heartily recommend it.

sudo gem install shotgun

shotgun config.ru -p 4567  # Launches your application on port 4567

Avoiding Rails 3 Dependency Hell with RVM

Former co-worker and all-around wacky guy Wayne Seguin is responsible for the most awesomest Ruby versioning tool, RVM. Here is a quick simple guide from railway showing you how to using it to help you play with the Rails 3 beta without having to deal with gem dependency hell. The “gem sets” feature of RVM is quite a nice addition as it allows you to have several gem setups without messing with your normal gem workflow for any given version of ruby you have installed via RVM.

That’s it for this week! Enjoy the tools!

Feeling Snarky

2010-02-16T00:00:00-08:00

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Confidence is 10% hard work and 90% delusion

—Tina Fey (via kapi)

The Sandlot vs. Reservoir Dogs

2010-02-13T00:00:00-08:00

The Sandlot vs. Reservoir Dogs

I don’t normally post links from Cracked.com but as a fan of both movies this was too funny to pass up.

The Tabloid Writing Prompt

2010-02-12T00:00:00-08:00

For the February Geek Writers group we have a rather fun writing prompt: pick a tabloid headline and bring it to life with your writing. It has proven so far to be a very difficult endeavor because there are so many delightfully crazy things to write about.

Personally I’m going with writing a short story in the vein of British author Tibor Fischer’s The Thought Gang, a book about a failed philosopher who befriends a one-armed bandit. The two decide to become bank robbers. It’s an interesting and hilarious read and I can’t wait to pay homage to it in my writing prompt submission. I’ll be sure to link it up when it’s complete.

How does a crazy story like that fit in with the idea of writing a tabloid headline? I’ll give you a hint if you promise not to spoil it for the group: My tabloid headline has to do with a biker being arrested after kidnapping a mime.

Man I can’t wait to read this out loud to a large group of people!

OK.rb Talk on Sinatra

2010-02-12T00:00:00-08:00

On Thursday February 11th, 2010 we held the last OK.rb Ruby User’s Group meeting in Edmond. As of March we’re moving the meeting to the OKC Coworking Collaborative to help hold the meetings in a more central area. I was honored to be the speaker for the evening and covered a topic I’m fairly passionate about right now: The micro-framework/web-DSL known as Sinatra!

Downloads the slides (PDF; 3.82MB)

I gave a talk covering the basics of the framework and why I find it useful and fun to use. I showed off the framework using a practical example of using it for a simple mashup of using data from Geokit and the Gowalla API to find Gowalla spots for any given address. It turned out to be quite a fun talk! You can find the code here:

http://github.com/bratta/spotfinder

Please note that the password for the okrb user in the project is NOT the correct password. I encourage you to create your own Gowalla account if you do not have one at http://gowalla.com and generate your own API key for your account and application. Feel free to fork the project and make something useful out of it. Right now it is bare-boned and I’m not doing anything to catch errors in it. So use it at your own risk and have fun learning Sinatra, Rack, and a few cool API’s!

Evolution of the Tardis

2010-02-12T00:00:00-08:00

Evolution of the Tardis

As a fan of Doctor Who, it is interesting to see how the iconic Tardis has evolved over the years.

V-Day Cometh

2010-02-11T00:00:00-08:00

Sunday—just a few scant days from the posting of this—will be February 14th, the dreaded Valentine’s Day. I say “dreaded” because it has always been a weird day for me even though for the past 13 years it has been rather good thanks to being with a wonderful woman.

However I think I’m forever traumatized by a particular Valentine’s Day in elementary school where my homeroom teacher that I adored forever jaded me. A few days beforehand the teacher handed out The List. The List contained the names of all the students in the homeroom class so that it would be easier for the students to remember everyone to give cards to.

I remember staying up the night before going through The List and filling out cards for everyone in the class. I can’t remember what cards I ended up getting, but I always enjoyed getting cards with my favorite cartoons on them like The Transformers or He-Man after spending too much time on the red and pink card isle at the store, looking at the countless boxes of toy advertisements… err, I mean Valentine’s Day cards.

The morning of Valentine’s Day we were supposed to take our cards and put them in these envelopes that were hanging on the wall, decorated with our names and various doodles of customization. I cheerfully went through and placed all the cards in the right kid’s envelope and went about my day, oblivious to the fact that I was about to get a major dose of rejection.

When it came time for everyone to open their cards and read the well-wishings from our peers, I noticed something a little off: I only had one or two valentines instead of the 20+ I should have had. Did everyone hate me? Did I do something wrong?

It turns out the teacher had left my name off The List and so most of the students in the class didn’t notice as they mechanically stuffed envelopes and checked off names as they went. Only my closest friends realized the omission and gave me a card anyway (for which I was grateful).

The teacher noticed me in tears and realized her mistake. She tried to tell the class to bring a Valentine’s Day card for me the next day but the damage had been done and so I screamed back a loud “No!” to prevent further embarrassment. I was mortified, humiliated, and just wanted to hide my head and disappear.

So yeah, I kind of don’t really care for the dreaded V-Day as that memory always comes back. Teachers, if you still make lists like this, please double-check it to make sure you’re not leaving off a kid. You could potentially ruin the holiday for life. ;)

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2010-02-11T00:00:00-08:00

Suited up for my Sinatra talk at OK.rb, I ended up looking like a stand-up comic.

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2010-02-11T00:00:00-08:00

Mellow out your Friday with a little Sigur Ros - Viorar Vel Til Loftarasa

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Epic. Pure epic win.

Tuesday Night Tech

2010-02-09T00:00:00-08:00

I’m starting a new tradition. I’m gonna share some neat links on Tuesdays that I’ve found throughout the week that are interesting to developers.

Gowalla API

Location-checkin-omg-new-items! service Gowalla has announced a new developer API. This API is dead simple to use and most of the responses are in easy-to-parse JSON format, making it easy to pair up with the programming language of your choice. I’m dreaming up some ideas involving Gowalla, Ruby, MongoDB, and maybe a few other web services to mash together to make something really interesting.

LESS - Leaner CSS

CSS is great, but one of its limitations is that it is fairly rigid in structure. Styles cascade, but there’s no mechanism for mixins, nor is there a way to do calculations or use variables. At least, until now. Enter Less: the gem that gives you more. A quick, simple “gem install less” and now you can have these things in your css. You can author a .less file using CSS + Less’s enhancements and Less will compile it down to real, validating CSS to serve up for the web. It’s neat and I’m already using it to serve up my dynamic stylesheets on timgourley.com.

Color Theory for Designers (Part 1)

This isn’t a piece of tech, per se, but it does shed some light on color theory that may come in handy for the beginning designer or a developer like me who has no real training in the art of all things graphical.

That’s it for now! I’ll have more next week.

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2010-02-08T00:00:00-08:00

A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg even though he knows that you are slightly cracked.

—Bernard Meltzer

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2010-02-08T00:00:00-08:00

Staring down at the floor at the OKC art museum.

First impressions of MongoDB on the Cloud

2010-02-08T00:00:00-08:00

So I’ve deployed a custom-written content management system for my website, timgourley.com, that is written using Sinatra. The database backend is MongoDB using John Nunemaker’s MongoMapper for most of the work. I’m also using GridFS to store image assets and serving them up through a separate Sinatra application.

Instead of running the MongoDB database on the same machine the web server is on, I decided to try out the MongoHQ service which is a remotely-hosted database service currently in beta. I was lucky enough to get an invitation to try out the service, and I hopped on the opportunity.

Right now they don’t offer replication, but you do get access to a MongoDB database that you can connect to from your application or even with the command-line tools. My first thought is that the thing is FAST. I mean blazing. Sure, I’m not working with a ton of data in MongoDB like I deal with at work, but the queries are nearly as responsive as if I were running the database locally.

My main concern is network latency, but with my small application with little traffic it is unnoticeable right now. If your application requires a lot of heavy processing, you might run into issues unless your application also exists on the same cloud as MongoHQ.

I also have concerns about downtime, but seeing as how MongoHQ runs on Amazon’s EC2 via Engine Yard’s Cloud offering, downtime should be minimal if it happens and they should be able to scale efficiently. And I happen to know that Engine Yard’s support staff kicks some MAJOR tail. *cough cough*

As an aside, I ran some tests locally on MongoDB using my mongobench benchmarking tool to see just how responsive the database is running a variety of queries, and I managed to drive a slice out of memory throwing 12 threads of pure unindexed map/reduce query hell at the database I was running. It might not be wise to test MongoHQ the same way, but it did show me that it would require some extremely poor queries with a lot of traffic to bring MongoDB to it’s knees. But you and I both know how people are and know that it will happen. And likely a lot.

So that does bring up a concern of mine about using this service in a production environment with a large amount of traffic: You’re essentially on a shared database if you use MongoHQ, so how well is it defended against other people’s bad queries? If someone else writes some massive unindexed map/reduce queries that drag things down are you going down with it? It’s my gut instinct that you’ll want to use MongoHQ for smaller projects with a small/medium amount of traffic. If you think you’ll end up having the same type of traffic SourceForge or Disqus has with their own MongoDB-driven code, you’ll definitely want to have your own servers with replication and sharding and monitoring.

First Post

2010-02-07T00:00:00-08:00

Greetings! I have decided to move my blog over to tumblr instead of using WordPress. I really dig the emphasis on multiple media formats, how easy and accessible it is, and how it isn’t WordPress! I’m also in the process of consolidating my web presence underneath the timgourley.com banner instead of slaggle.com. I mean, what exactly is a slaggle anyway?

The goal of this blog is to present my coherent and not-so-coherent thoughts on the subjects of Ruby development, writing, and events in my personal life. Basically, this blog is for things that are really important to me. So hopefully you’ll get to know me a little better and learn something in the process.

So who am I?

I’m Tim Gourley, just some thirty-something guy who enjoys Ruby development. I work for a rad company called Engine Yard as one of the guys who makes sure your site keeps running and is scalable for events such as surviving mentions on digg, slashdot, techcrunch, or even the freaking Super Bowl.

I’m also a writer. I run a writing group called the Geek Writers that meets in midtown OKC monthly to geek out over the writing craft. We’re just a bunch of geeks who love to write and share our passion with others. I have two completed novels under my belt that will probably never see the light of day since I’m so critical of my own work. But someday I’ll be famous. Oh yes. Someday I will.

Expect me to update this blog often. This blog will rock so hard you’ll feel it in your shins. We’re gonna crank this baby up and see how many bytes of AWESOMENESS your fat network pipe can safely handle. Hang on tight, peeps. You’re in for a crazy ride on the Tim Train.

And first post? Yeah: nailed it!